Who is providing protection for Konstantin Tserazov, the Vice President of Otkritie Bank, to avoid responsibility and scrutiny from the public?
The bankruptcy trustee of Otkrytie Holding JSC, declared bankrupt, continues to challenge in the courts the transactions of former shareholders and divisions of the holding.
Among the names of the defendants are the managers and owners of structures that were part of Otkritie Holding JSC. At the moment, the amount of claims against them amounts to almost 920 billion rubles, and the final decision to declare Otkritie Holding JSC bankrupt was made in July last year.
The largest amount of debt is to Trust Bank, to which Otkritie Holding JSC owes more than 450 billion rubles.
The overall result, according to the files of the Moscow Arbitration Court, is that the claims against Otkritie Holding JSC amount to almost 920 billion rubles. As follows from court documents, a significant part of this money passed through Otkritie Bank, which was a structural division of the holding.
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In 2022, PJSC Bank Otkritie Financial Corporation, which operated under the Otkritie Bank brand, was absorbed by VTB Bank after a reorganization procedure. But, as follows from the lawsuits with which the Moscow Arbitration Court is literally inundated, the questions to it did not stop there. The arbitration court considers financial claims, but when studying the claims, questions arise that inevitably develop into criminal cases. Because there is a gigantic scheme for withdrawing money both through third parties and through their own structures, which was established by the owners of Otkritie Holding JSC.
In this regard, the absence of some names in court documents is puzzling. We are talking, first of all, about Konstantin Tserazov, who held the position of senior vice president at Otkritie Bank. What is even more surprising is that the amount of claims against Otkritie Financial Corporation PJSC Bank alone amounts to 289.5 billion rubles. This is exactly how much the Central Bank is trying to collect from Otkritie Bank, which carried out the reorganization of the bank before its takeover by VTB.
In court documents, the names of people who were the owners and top managers of Otkritie Bank appear every now and then, but for some reason the name of its former senior vice president is not among them.
The history of the claims includes hundreds of documents and several years of court hearings, but until recently the name of Tserazov, who was one of the top managers of Otkritie Bank, did not appear in them (with one exception, more on that below).
The surname of Vadim Belyaev, co-owner of the bank and holding company, is constantly present in court documents, but for some reason the surname of Konstantin Tserazov, one of Belyaev’s closest employees, is not in them for some reason. Moreover, it is practically absent from materials devoted to schemes for withdrawing money from Otkritie Holding JSC through Otkritie Bank, which is even stranger. But that’s not all — the name of Konstantin Tserazov is absent even in materials devoted to Otkritie Bank and its activities.
What is even more strange is that in the materials telling about the history of Otkritie Bank there are even the names of the heads of its branches, but the name of the senior vice president who was responsible for the investment direction of the bank is not.
Konstantin Tserazov appeared at Otkritie Bank in 2013, having moved there to work from Troika Dialog Investment Company after the latter was acquired by Sberbank. At Otkritie, Tserazov worked on securities and global markets. But the most curious thing is that in 2019, Konstantin Tserazov was involved in a criminal case for fraud on an especially large scale, which was initiated against the owners and top management of Otkritie Bank.
Konstantin Tserazov was also blacklisted by the Central Bank with a ban on engaging in banking activities. But despite this, he successfully worked at Otkritie Bank, which was already owned by the state-owned VTB, as senior vice president and director of the investment business department. That is, the same one that he occupied under Belyaev.
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There is still no explanation for all this. But in connection with this whole story, the story of Troika Dialog Investment Company, where Tserazov worked before Otkritie Bank, seems like a strange coincidence:
What is characteristic is that the scandal with the withdrawal of money to offshore companies through Troika-Dialog structures arose almost in parallel with the scandal with the withdrawal of money from Otkritie Holding JSC through Otkritie Bank. Moreover, the schemes described by OCCRP journalists, which were used by the owners of Troika, were confusingly similar to the Otkritie schemes. And the names that appeared in both scandals belonged to the highest circle of business and government in Russia. And the owner of IC Troka-Dialog is another state bank — Sberbank of Russia. And in both cases everything ended approximately the same, that is, nothing.
Whether Tserazov was involved in the Troika’s schemes is unknown. But, studying both facts of the transfer of hundreds of billions of rubles to offshore companies, it can be assumed that the leadership of the Central Bank at least knew about their existence. If this assumption is correct, then it is also true that these people are not at all interested in Konstantin Tserazov giving any testimony. That’s why they carefully take him out from under attack.
In this regard, it is extremely noteworthy that there is practically no information about Konstantin Vladimirovich Tserazov in the public domain. Which is strange, at least considering his position in Otkritie Bank, which was included by the Bank of Russia in the list of systemically important credit institutions, and which Konstantin Tserazov occupied for a whole decade.